Google’s top search result is Google

https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/07/28/google-search-results-prioritize-google-products-over-competitors

by danso • 6 years ago

385 302 6 years ago

pen2l• 6 years ago

Falls within the purview of their job of being an information-search tool I’d say.

There are times when I want a specific piece of information as quickly as possible and with as few clicks as possible, and other times I’m doing more exploratory searches, it seems google lets me do both pretty well.

uniqueid4• 6 years ago

Google doesn't bother showing the user results for his/her actual search terms anymore, and stuffs most of the page with AMP links and paid results... but it's not them, it's you.

But if Google AI were really as bad at replacing simple grep they wouldn't be popular, etc etc.

rightbyte• 6 years ago

Ye. It is really annoying that verbatim querries still are not quite verbatim. I get a feeling Google search index is just really an aggregate of a couple of 1000s big sites.

tweetle_beetle• 6 years ago

I think the issue is that Google did not launch as an "information-search tool". It slowly transitioned into one in line with advertising becoming its business model. Weirdly we are back where we started and I find the portal analogy actually very apt. Yes the technology has improved, but the Google of today is much closer to 2000 Yahoo![1] than 2000 Google[2] - trying to curate and own as much of the internet browsing experience as possible.

Taken to the extreme, Google would be very happy to keep a copy of every website and only let you browse the internet on its terms in its walled garden. We're already heading there with AMP. Do we want to sacrifice a couple of seconds of our time for that?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20000229042533/http://search.yah...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130122200020/http://www.google...

mrgreenfur• 6 years ago

This reminds me of the recent news about Amazon, spying on partners products and then offering them. This is the end game for all platforms that control demand, slowly take more and more vertical integration to capture segments of larger value. This includes 'pure information' that they steal from publishers (and thus remove visits from the publisher) and normal verticals, like travel/shopping/tools/etc.

I'm not sure that these marketplaces / demand owners should be able to as they wield unfair power vs other vertical specific offerings.

chdaniel• 6 years ago

I know there's the sentiment of fear/hate/etc about Google taking over but...

1) Doesn't it make sense for them to do that? After offering the search engine for free for ages (not that paid search engines are a thing) and playing an important role in building the internet? For most, all the internet they know is thanks to Google

2) Wouldn't you do the same? Keep in mind they're a public company and we know how incentives are aligned when you're a public company

gberger• 6 years ago

not that paid search engines are a thing

They are in enterprise, but I digress

Jaruzel• 6 years ago

Interestingly, they couldn't break into Enterprise Search (their Google-in-a-box product failed).

onetimemanytime• 6 years ago

1) Doesn't it make sense for them to do that? After offering the search engine for free for ages (not that paid search engines are a thing)

They've made a fortune so instead of saying they've "offered it for free" let's point out that they are not a charity. Google became famous for saying that they will list the best SE when ranking, not Google properties or ads.

>and playing an important role in building the internet? For most, all the internet they know is thanks to Google

Even if you said is true, another one would have done what Google did. By the way, internet as we know it today, would have happened without Google. In fact, MS and Apple did a LOT more for the internet...a computer in every home and all.

badrabbit2• 6 years ago

No, I wouldn't do the same. Maximize profits? Yes, sacrifice core values and even social stability to acheive the goal? Nope. Be deceptive, do things against people's will? Nope.

jfoster• 6 years ago

Can you mention the worst or most deceptive thing they've done?

uniqueid4• 6 years ago

Give me a break. Google hasn't been a net positive for the internet in nearly a decade. And cry me a river about their "free" search. They're worth over $600 billion, much of which they acquired by selling out their users' privacy. These days, Google is a blight on the world, and deserves all the criticism lobbed at it.

antibuddy• 6 years ago

Yeah it makes sense, however I don't think we should be grateful* that Google played an important role in building the internet, since for Google it is about control and that's where the problems begin.

*not that this was your point

uniqueid4• 6 years ago

Google didn't exist for the first decade of the web. When they came along, their innovation was minor and incremental: slightly more accurate search without paid results (funny how things change).

They then did a version of Hotmail with a worse GUI, but virtually limitless disk space.

Google just poaches talent away from more deserving companies, and puts it to work making their products a little worse every year than they were the year before. I'm not thankful for Google. I'm sad because they stifle progress.

ocdtrekkie5• 6 years ago

The fact that it "makes sense" for companies to become evil monopolies when they are capable of doing so is a problem. It's like a big hole in our economic system where everything breaks down and grinds to a halt.

jjcon2• 6 years ago

The fact that it "makes sense" for companies to become evil monopolies when they are capable of doing so is a problem

I’m no google fan but I don’t think evil is an appropriate word nor would I call them a monopoly when it comes to search. There are plenty of other options out there from all over the world, the fact that they aren’t that great isn’t googles fault (and it would need to be for them to be considered a monopoly).

roenxi• 6 years ago

I know there's the sentiment of fear/hate/etc about Google taking over but... 1) Doesn't it make sense for them to do that?

There isn't any point being fearful/hateful/etc about stuff that it doesn't make sense for someone to do. If someone is acting against their own self interests it makes sense to speak persuasively. And they will likely stop doing it in time even if left to themselves.

michaelbuckbee• 6 years ago

What's missing from this is an "arms length relationship" - Google is making so much from ads that they're able to swamp entire industries with offhand choices.

I would very much like Google to experiment with new technologies and services (translate, flights, etc.) but I wish they'd spin them out as separate services and have them pay for placement in search results or fight it out for SEO placement.

As it stands they can launch mediocre products that do well as the new products get "free" premium placement.

samoa42• 6 years ago

playing an important role in building the internet?

which role would that have been? internet was fine before google streamlined the web.

For most, all the internet they know is thanks to Google

search, youtube and maps were great additions to the web, but i think most ppl here can share the mixed feelings about bringing the masses on the web.

zsfgininionio• 6 years ago

I wouldn't do that in a million years. We need to get rid of this idea that everyone is selfish, greedy and evil and, therefore, criticizing corruption is hypocritical. I really am better than Google executives, and you should strive to be as well.

The way people so casually excuse immoral behaviour, as if we have no obligation to do the right thing, truly sickens me.

madoublet• 6 years ago

I think it is just nostalgia for when the Internet was still young and interesting. Google made it easier and much faster to get to good, useful content. Now, it is just a mess. SEO/SEM folks beat Google. Now, no matter what you search, you either get content directly from Google or one of the thousands (maybe millions?) of content farms hoping to scrape a few pennies from your search.

mellow2020• 6 years ago

I know there's the sentiment of fear/hate/etc about Google taking over but...

It's the other way around, for these and other such shennanigans by other such megacorporations colonizing our protocols (rather than "building the internet"): yeah, it might make sense for them, in a selfish, short-term, myopic kind of way, but it harms the greater good. Apart from making it rather deplorable how they ate/eat chalk to get their foot in the door.

For most, all the internet they know is thanks to Google

How so? Because most people "just google things"? You might as well say all the internet they know is thanks to whoever provided the electricity at the time.

People who make good websites made the interwebs something to flock something to in the first place, even though hardly anyone in the real world cared or knew about the web. These days, everybody is on the web because everybody is on the web, and people share workarounds for the latest corporate BS, and "hope" they will "listen" etc. That there are people for whom that's all they know doesn't mean those should be catered to.

cowpig2• 6 years ago

3) Isn't a system in which monopolistic business practices make sense a fundamentally broken one?

4) Shouldn't we, as members of a democratic system of government, be concerned that this has become the case? And express that concern to others in order to spread understanding and continue the democratic process?

5) Isn't it strange how Hacker News comments so often take the position of large companies, as if those individuals aren't going to suffer from a small number of multi-trillion dollar companies ingesting entire industries in the long term?

martinskou• 6 years ago

Search is essential infrastructure for the internet and should not be monopolized.

It should be free, uncluttered, distributed and transparent.

The problem is not Google, its the lack of good alternatives, only DDG really.

bilal4hmed• 6 years ago

Im guessing the alternatives get better the more you use them.

Otherwise there are a lot of alternatives like : Bing Duck Duck Go ( as you mentioned ) Startpage Yandex

stOneskull• 6 years ago

an image search for 'lemon party' is a good test.

ZinniaZirconium4• 6 years ago

Duck is a front-end for Bing. Why not use Bing?

dredmorbius4• 6 years ago

That's both tired and inaccurate.

DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from multiple partners, though most commonly from Bing (and none from Google).

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

diffeomorphism• 6 years ago

For the same reason you would use startpage instead of google. Or because you like the !bangs. Or because you prefer the layout. Or because you like the instant answers. Or because you think it might be worthwhile to support a small, not (particularly) evil search engine.

Suppose for just a moment that you were right and it were identical to Bing, just with slightly better privacy. Why not use Duck instead of Bing?

josefresco2• 6 years ago

This might be helpful: https://www.quora.com/Why-should-I-use-DuckDuckGo-instead-of...

dlkf• 6 years ago

Search is essential infrastructure for the internet

Agree 100%

and should not be monopolized

There's an argument to be made that search is a case of natural monopoly. Today, google's success doesn't stem from PageRank. It's stems from Learning to Rank algorithms. Every time you click a hit, Google learns something. If you started distributing search traffic amongst a competitive market, no one provider would get the same training data Google gets today. The more competitive the market, the thinner each competitor's training data is - and consequently, the worse their product will be. To illustrate, think about how much better google is than DDG/Bing, and then how much better DDG/Bing is than whatever is third. (Apparently the third best is sufficiently bad that neither you nor I know what it is.)

Since Google is A) pretty far ahead of everyone else in this space and B) extremely secretive about search, it's really difficult to discern how much of their success comes from "more data" and how much comes from "better algos."

The problem is not Google, its the lack of good alternatives, only DDG really.

My understanding is that a lot of DDG's value comes from using Bing. It's not a pure re-skin, but it aggregates results from multiple search engines and Bing is the biggest. (I'm not a DDG expert so please correct me if I'm getting it wrong here.)

The problem is that Bing is good for the same reasons as Google: they are the second biggest in a winner-takes-most market. They get lots of data (though not enough to be as good as Google), and presumably do all the same things for which people dislike Google.

So in short, maybe regulation is a more realistic goal than competition? I don't actually know where I stand here. I'm sure their are people here who disagree fiercely with everything I'm suggesting. I'd be grateful to hear their counterarguments.

mrkramer6• 6 years ago

Alternatives don't matter when distribution channels are controlled and locked in. Google controls 70% browser market share on PC(https://tinyurl.com/yxwjwnv7) and 64% mobile browser market share(https://tinyurl.com/y4uufb9d). But I think Google's problem is not dominant market position but slow pace of service quality improvement. Searching on Google 10 years ago and today feels way too similar and not much improved in terms of quality and UX.

ss7pro3• 6 years ago

It changed a lot I spend much less times searching and rather most of the time reading what I was looking for. It was opposite 10 years ago.

uniqueid4• 6 years ago

   > Search is essential infrastructure for the internet and should not be monopolized.

Exactly! What a mess to have Google Marketing farting around with the world's information spigot. It's a good thing opportunities aren't physical objects, because it would be mightily depressing if we could see Google toss potential cures for cancer, and strategies for world peace down a well.

ZinniaZirconium4• 6 years ago

Not really though. My top search result on most topics is usually Wikipedia. Maybe if you're searching for Google you find Google.

danso• 6 years ago

FTA

How a search for “Linux” has changed. In 2000, Google only returned “organic” results, ads, and a category header. Now the top of the page is full of Google products and “answers.” Source: 2000 screenshot/Archive.org

2000 screenshot: https://mrkp-static-production.themarkup.org/graphics/google...

2020 screenshot: https://mrkp-static-production.themarkup.org/graphics/google...

ZinniaZirconium4• 6 years ago

I find Linux.org and Wikipedia. I must be in a helpful search bubble for people who want actual information instead of ads and news.

c8g• 6 years ago

2020: https://i.imgur.com/kq1AxqY.png

tehabe• 6 years ago

Maybe, Google should be forced to create a separate tab for the knowledge graph and other tools. like they are doing it for images, the news, or videos. when I want to search the web, I want to search the web.

Because I see the issues with this. I also think those information have a value for users.

throw_m2393392• 6 years ago

Maybe Google's search business and ad business should be broken up...

Havoc• 6 years ago

Tricky. It does feel anti-competitive but at the same time their info is usually also the best. So a strong argument can be made that it’s 1 based on merit

kevingadd7• 6 years ago

Everything's "based on merit" until merit doesn't line up with the company's interests anymore.

I use google translate and maps and images all the time, so them showing up at the top of the results page isn't inconvenient for me, but sometimes when I use them I get results that are actively bad and I have to go seek out other services. There are probably many cases where I get bad results and am not informed enough to recognize that the results were bad!

vlkr• 6 years ago

You don't know if it's the best because there is no competition to discover better info. All other websites are presented with only 2 or 3 lines of text (search results) and have no free access to presentation forms that googles own content has.

topicseed• 6 years ago

Google Search is an information-search tool — and results often come as websites (the usual search result links), but also as widgets. Google can absolutely be the curator and a provider of information.

rydre3• 6 years ago

The problem is that website are commodities. The future for original high quality websites is that they should not allow search engines to crawl their content and slowly become a brand which people trust. Stop relying on search for traffic. Be an app, websites for marketing only.

Alternative new search engines are needed that allow for embedding/iframe/integration of global web search results in any 3rd party website free of cost. Then the new search engine should share ad revenue with the website that embeds their results+ads. Google does not allow that, but there is a real opportunity here. Embeddable global search engine that websites would like to integrate with.

A search engine that website would love to integrate. A search engine that websites would advertise themselves because they win too. Unlike the current scenario where only Google wins.

mrkramer6• 6 years ago

I never understood why websites are not personal property and why US gov. decided that anybody can crawl and scrape them at will and free of charge. That would be similar to someone crawling your house and making it fully visible and searchable to the global public . I guess Google Maps already did that.

My understanding is that .com (commerce) prevailed and people who have websites want to be fully public, visible and searchable.

On the other hand deep web and dark web exist but most of the people who use it and operate there do it because of shady business.

I don't entirely understand your search engine idea but if internet would start all over again I think the right model for search engine would be to have website owners submit their websites to the search engines along with metadata so searching experience becomes rich.

Metadata would be similar to something like Resource Description Framework https://www.dlib.org/dlib/may98/miller/05miller.html

rydre3• 6 years ago

*I don't entirely understand your search engine idea

Does google allow for iframeing or customizing it's search results? No. A new search engine that has a API/plugin for 3rd party websites so that websites can integrate a global search engine into the website like google integrates websites' content into its instant answers. There is room for innovation here when 3rd party websites get creative in displaying global search results in different ways simple or complicated ways. If there are Ads in results, the website gets paid a % of the ad revenue that the search engine made due to the website embedding it's results.

Search engine's are high margin business, so they should be able to share 50% revenue with websites.

throw_m2393392• 6 years ago

The future is certainly Google as a frontpage for basically everything, from search to maps to shopping to whatever is thing still independent from Google today. That's inevitable if Google is allowed to continue like that. Google needs to be broken up.

chimen4• 6 years ago

Many of them save me extra clicks which is convenient. Google translate, maps and search has no competitors that even come close in terms of quality. I will get mad when those products have better alternatives but it's not the case. Build better alternatives and I'm on board. In the end, Google is a business - I would promote my own shit on the first vertical as well. One thing that pisses me off is the AMP ordeal but, other than that, I extract value from Google.

I am on Google to find results to my questions - I want the quickest exit and that's what they provide. If they fail to do that they back down trust me, these guys watch "the numbers" carefully.

kevingadd7• 6 years ago

"I will get mad when those products have better alternatives but it's not the case. Build better alternatives and I'm on board."

How will you find out about the better alternatives? Are you certain there aren't good alternatives to translate, maps, flights, shopping etc? For any language? I know for a fact that google translate is bad for some ideographic languages and as a result there are competing services that companies have started to use instead (DeepL, etc).

If the competition is better, how will you know? Are you going to dedicate time to hunting down alternatives and testing them out when the Google product is the only thing on screen and it works?

sidibe• 6 years ago

Someone will mention better alternatives here, after all I've been hearing about how ddg blows Google out of the water a couple times every week here for years.

chimen4• 6 years ago

I am constantly trying new things. I just ditched duckduck go for the third time. I'm using firefox since 2 months. I am aware of alternatives. I WANT to ditch Google too but I get value from it atm that I cannot find elsewhere.

leetcrew• 6 years ago

I think you're overselling your point here. if I search "maps" in google, the google product is the first hit, but several major alternatives are right under it on the first page of results. FWIW, DeepL is also on the first page for "translate".

I don't actually want to discover new products by finding their homepages in my search results. when I am looking for something new, I want to read a review in a publication I trust or at least a discussion among real humans in a forum.

osdiab• 6 years ago

It's mostly been word of mouth for me - Japanese friends telling me DeepL is way better for Japanese, people on HN complaining about Google Chrome performance vs Firefox.

And competitors are coming pretty close to other Google stuff, Apple Maps is actually getting pretty good for me right now but mainly lacks the metadata about things like restaurant menus + the flexibility of routing like cheapest train fares or searching by last train and what not that Google has - honestly seems like low hanging fruit. Nobody gets close on search yet though, I've tried and failed to stick with DDG many times now.

asfasfasf12• 6 years ago

DeepL is better than google translate.

chimen4• 6 years ago

Just tested and tried translating English to romanian (my language) - doesn't exist :)

matsemann• 6 years ago

How would a better alternative surface?

chimen4• 6 years ago

Here, on ProductHunt and any other way. How did Firefox re-invent itself? It attacked the very thing that Google could not provide: privacy. How is DDG on such a good trend lately? It requires a lot of effort I agree but google also put a lot of effort into their own products.

xwdv• 6 years ago

Some would say maybe the little startups should have a chance.

jagged-chisel• 6 years ago

Then they have to start by building a better product. Any suggestions for alternative services that outperform Google’s?

Slartie• 6 years ago

Actually, on text translations, DeepL nowadays outclasses Google Translate IMHO. The only downside is that they don't appear to offer some kind of transparent website translate feature ("put a URL in and it translates the entire site, with layout kept intact"), at least not for free. But if I happen to have a paragraph or so in some foreign language and want that translated to some language I can understand, DeepL has become my first stop due to its consistently higher result quality.

vinay427• 6 years ago

I would be prepared to switch over completely for the languages they support if DeepL didn't insert their advertisement at the bottom of some results (I've had this accidentally included in an email before), and if they had a mobile app with a text selection action on Android to highlight text and see a popup with the translation. As it is, I use it most of the time but still rely on Google Translate being more accessible. Obviously DeepL is newer, so these limitations are understandable.

bobsoap• 6 years ago

Same here, I've been consistently surprised at how much better (and more natural/accurate) deepl is than google at translating, especially for sentences and paragraphs.

abrowne2• 6 years ago

I agree DeepL is often as good or better. (I will sometimes try both and compare. Usually I prefer about half from each, but both are fine on their own.) But DeepL doesn't support nearly as as many languages. Google Translate supports, to pick a few, Basque, Gujarati, Kazakh, Igbo and Thai. Some of those don't have a huge number of speakers, but they also have Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Indonesian and Swahili, all in the top 20 by number of speakers.

Yes, I know some of these are done through a intermediary (often English, but not always). So if you translate Ukrainian → Catalan it probably really does Ukrainian → Russian → Spanish → Catalan. But it can still be helpful to have the options.

alienchow• 6 years ago

Anecdote disclaimer.

Learning Spanish right now so I'm excited to learn about this better translator. The very first word I tested was "por favor".

DeepL detected it as English and translated it into Spanish to give "por favor" == "por favor".

Same for "una mas". To be fair, it worked once I properly accented the "a".

I'll be using this for longer sentences instead.

pgrote• 6 years ago

I am the product.

I understand this with google and accept it. They can extract whatever information they want in exchange for decent results when I search whether it comes from them or not.

I get gmail, a phone os, a browser, an os, remote desktop and more for free from them. I pay for youtube premium.

The value I get from google is worth it. Everything they provide is good enough and when I want a third party site or information I can get it.

As a consumer, Google offers a great deal.

There are two pain points with google. The first is support, but what can you do when it is free. The second is the rollout of new products and then abandoning them.

I do not run a business that is affected by Google's decisions, though. I understand if you are a company competing in an area google participates it is unfair.

andrepd2• 6 years ago

The bitch is when you're forced to use their products whether you like it or not. Case in point recaptcha. Also many users are not in the least aware of the trade going on, and the magnitude and invasiveness of the surveillance.

reaperducer3• 6 years ago

I understand this with google and accept it. They can extract whatever information they want in exchange for decent results when I search whether it comes from them or not. I get gmail, a phone os, a browser, an os, remote desktop and more for free from them. I pay for youtube premium.

I don't want to cheapen the horror of spousal abuse, but your statements sound exactly like the kind of excuses that a victim of domestic violence makes.

"He only does that when he's drinking." "Google only tracks me when I'm breathing."

I don't think you even realize how you've been trained into a mindset like some kind of circus animal.

athenot• 6 years ago

The thing is, increasingly I'm catching it returning wrong answers. A few days I was looking up the approximate weight of a cup of flour to do a recipe conversion, and the "helpful answer" was pulled from some random site and was about 15% off-base compared to the median from a handful of other sites, including from flour companies.

I've observed similar bad results when looking up information about medications… I feel bad for those acting on that information.

Just like ads, I've learned to tune out that top part of the search result page. Honestly, the increasing noise feels a lot like Yahoo! in 2001.

leeoniya• 6 years ago

i run into this so often it might as well be called misinformation. it will surface parts of 2 different sentances which completely changes the meaning or context, or removes important nuance.

edoceo2• 6 years ago

Well, one cup (volume) of flour can vary pretty widely in weight (108-138g in my notebook). Bleached, whole, Rye, AP, etc and even same type across brands. A variance of 15% is not too odd from my baking experience.

_jal2• 6 years ago

I mainly use DDG, but when I look at a google page, it is just gross. We've gone well beyond contempt for the consumer, deep in to plain-old tacky.

torgoguys• 6 years ago

“We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible,” co-founder Larry Page said in 2004.

The article presents you as some sort of "gotcha" quote demonstrating how Google overturned a core value or something. Yes, Google search results have changed, but what it is now is very much in the spirit of that original value. I searched for something. Google gave me the answer directly. Boom, I'm done. Get in, get the answer fast, get out. I can go back to my life.

zentiggr6• 6 years ago

And who gives a crap about the livelihoods of the sources Google pulled that info from and now will never see your traffic.

You think Google did all the original research and information creation to populate their answers?

And since when do they provide decent attribution and link-throughs to the sources they used, so you can check their graph? Or do you really trust Google's automation of everything to generate accurate results every time?

hrktb2• 6 years ago

Many of them save me extra clicks which is convenient.

I think the point is that some are convenient, others aren’t, but they all have prominent positioning. Google is not the best flight search service, yet it’s on top.

As you say, it wouldn’t matter if Google was the best at everything all the time. The issue is that of course it isn’t, and will never be.

andrepd2• 6 years ago

Out of curiosity which flight search is better than flights.google?

boogies7• 6 years ago

Google translate, maps and search has no competitors that even come close in terms of quality.

This is patently false, and probably a reflection of the Google bubble you live in.

DeepL is pretty objectively superior to Google, as evaluated by journalists who natively speak the languages it translates in the articles linked on their website. You can find plenty of in depth reviews online, and every one I've read has admitted that it's at absolute worst as bad as Google Translate. Edit: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/29/deepl-schools-other-online...

Maps is a different story, but there are certainly better options for certain specific needs. I'd like to see the noise-pollution based routing service on HN's frontpage yesterday remade with Google Maps.

Search is somewhat subjective, but I haven't used Google Search in several years and I don't consider an engine that requires me to scroll past page after page of ads — including what amount to ads for services like Google's inferior flight service, that won't necessarily be easily removed by an "out of the box" ad blocker — high quality.

And those are the services you picked. The article has a great little analysis of Google Flights and why "It did not crack the top 10 of Frommer’s 2020 ranking of airfare search engines, for instance" and why the FTC's leaked documents called it out for providing less options. (Spoiler: Up to 80% more expensive flights, when it found flights at all).

pydry• 6 years ago

I've found plenty of situations where OSM has better data than Google Maps.

gfxgirl3• 6 years ago

Google's flight service is not a booking service. It's flight search. It just redirects you to the airline in question.

Personally I love it. It's so much faster than all the competitors. Further it not covered in ads. I just went to SkyScanner and there's an ad for fried chicken. Seriously WTF!

_jal2• 6 years ago

Anyone remember the 90s-era Windows rants about how it was simply objectively better at <x>, as demonstrated by a lack of competition?

Good times.

anoncake• 6 years ago

To be fair, DeepL doesn't support all the languages Google supports.

hnlmorg• 6 years ago

Google translate, maps and search has no competitors that even come close in terms of quality.

There certainly did used to be competition to Google Translate but Google crushed them by promoting their own services (which came later)[1].

I often see the argument made that these monopolies just happen to have the best software but often those arguments miss how those monopolies had already killed the competition and were now suffocating the market so new competition struggles to rise. This was a common tactic by Microsoft in the 90s too, so it's by no means unique to Google.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel_Fish_(website)

ViViDboarder2• 6 years ago

Exactly. We can see that in the future for the examples from the article too.

When Google started promoting Google Flights and Hotels over other sites, they did not offer close to the best information. In fact, as the article claims, they still don’t. Yet despite that competitors are losing traffic and going out of business (eg. Hipmunk).

It’s not hard to see where this leads over time. The competitors struggle to stay in business or even get the traffic needed to improve their products while Google gets to keep investing and iterating. Maybe in 5-10 years they’ll have a product better than the existing ones, but they’ll also have driven most competitors to obscurity.

magicalist2• 6 years ago

There certainly did used to be competition to Google Translate but Google crushed them by promoting their own services (which came later)[1].

Yahoo was the search engine that crushed altavista, then ultimately bought babelfish and let it rot, all several years before google translate came out.

JadeNB3• 6 years ago

Many of them save me extra clicks which is convenient. Google translate, maps and search has no competitors that even come close in terms of quality. … Build better alternatives and I'm on board.

This is why they don't have better competitors. To compete with Google, you have to, out of the gate, and with them as mediators, match or exceed on every aspect of their experience a company that, from the perspective of just about any competitor out there, has just about unlimited resources.

If you do start to make it and gain some traction—again, necessarily often through Google's own services—it is well within Google's power to focus on you specifically, say, by snooping on your data on an Android phone, and make sure to drive you out of the market.

birksherty• 6 years ago

I agree. The reason I still use google is most of the times I don't have to open another website to get my answers. I don't have to load the slow javascript heavy sites and saves me time. Google is not just links to websites but also serves information directly. Obviously if I need better understanding and deep knowledge I open the links, but I don't need that often.

hbharadwaj• 6 years ago

Edge Chromium has Microsoft Translate which does a pretty good job as well

wmeredith• 6 years ago

When a better one comes along ... you'll never know.

onion2k3• 6 years ago

Build better alternatives and I'm on board. In the end, Google is a business - I would promote my own shit on the first vertical as well.

You: I wish people would build products that successfully compete with Google.

Also you: It's fine if Google do things that stop their competitors successfully competing with Google.

This is literally exactly the reason why anti-trust laws exist - to stop a company who are successful in one area (search, advertising) unfairly dominating other areas (maps, translation) by suppressing their competition. For all you know there might be a map provider that you'd prefer - but while Google leverage their advantage running the premier search engine to put themselves at the top of every geographic search you're never going to find out.

Mirioron2• 6 years ago

But if Google search didn't send me to Google maps when I was looking for maps then I would explicitly go to Google maps. In that case there would be no chance for any competitor to do better.

ehsankia2• 6 years ago

The word "Compete" here is misleading. It's rather: I wish people would build better products than Google's.

According to you, Google should send users to a strictly worse app, so that it can become better over time? And unless it requires a lot of user data to become a better app, I don't see why it needs traffic from Google to become a better product.

Once it is an arguably better product, then yes, Google should definitely link to it first.

neya• 6 years ago

unfairly dominating other areas

Out of curiosity, what exactly about Maps is unfair? They made money, they invested it in better mapping technology. You could say the same about Apple too, they bundled their Maps application with every iPhone sold which you couldn't even uninstall for a long time. And they had more money than Google too - yet their maps application was and still is garbage.

It just so happens Google Maps is the better product here and has nothing to do with anti-competitiveness. I was in China and I tried using both Apple and Google Maps (via VPN). And guess which one lead me to a wrong railway station?

ksk2• 6 years ago

Data based algorithms can only get better when you feed them data. Google makes sure that the data only goes to their own algorithms. Its a chicken and egg situation IMHO.

dvduval• 6 years ago

There are some great translation tools besides Google translate. I find Microsoft translate sometimes outperforms Google translate for certain languages. For example Google doesn't even have Cantonese. And there are some translation apps coming out of China that are also really awesome. I can't speak for other languages. I just wanted to point out that Google putting themselves first in the results is not always an indicator that it is the best results.

lhorie• 6 years ago

Google translate, maps and search has no competitors that even come close in terms of quality. I will get mad when those products have better alternatives but it's not the case.

Just think about it: where do you think the money to fund development of maps, translation etc comes from? Nobody pays a dime to use these services, so they clearly aren't self-sustaining.

Now think about your own income. Imagine google comes up with some way to provide the same skillset you offer by pouring ad money into researching some hypothetical singularity AI or whatever, and then offering that to your employers for free (in exchange for ad placement in your company's end product), causing you to lose not only your job, but your ability to get any related jobs anywhere.

That's obviously an extreme and highly hypothetical scenario, but it illustrates what anti-trust laws are supposed to stop.

tenebrisalietum• 6 years ago

search

There was a recent HN post about the declining quality of Google search in that most search results seem to be more and more leading to SEO spam. Is your experience with Google Search different?

simonkafan• 6 years ago

You write this like its a fact but it's just your opinion. Deepl.com for example is on par and imho even better than Google Translate for some languages.

jaggirs• 6 years ago

Then you should get mad, because there are better alternatives to google translate (deepl).

el-salvador• 6 years ago

It depends on the country.

Naver has super detailed maps of Korea.

Yandex Street View image quality is great in Russia.

wazoox• 6 years ago

Deepl crushes Google Translate in quality. Depending upon your needs (bike, anyone? -> https://cycle.travel - minimal gas consumption? try https://maps.openrouteservice.org/ ) there are better alternatives to Google Maps. DuckDuckGo is much less annoying than Google and for a few years arguably as good.

vbezhenar• 6 years ago

Deepl works better than translate. Yandex and 2Gis works better than Google maps for my region. Google search is superb, can't really argue with that.

chris92de• 6 years ago

Google translate, maps and search has no competitors that even come close in terms of quality.

At least for Translate I can wholeheartedly recommend DeepL as competitor.

Does it lack languages? Sure, but the quality of translations seem subjectively better than that of Google Translate - especially for longer texts.

pwdisswordfish2• 6 years ago

This is a very typical response on HN in response to articles/blog posts about issues raised by the Google business.

When these sort of comments rise to the top of HN threads, I am at a loss how to interpret the meaning.

1. Does it mean the commenter and HN voters do not care about the issue (e.g., anti-competitive behaviour)?

2. Does it mean they normally would care about anti-competitive behaviour but because they "like" this particular company they do not care?

If the commenter means #2, then it seems like there are some assumptions being made. For example, one assumption might be that if Google is held accountable for anti-competitive behaviour then it will affect the commenter's "web user experience".

However, I cannot see how to arrive at that conclusion. In fact, the commenter states "Build better alternatives and I'm on board."

What if anti-competitive behaviour was an impediment to others seeking to "[b]uild better alternatives"? If holding Google to account for anti-competitive behaviour would remove such impediments, then it seems that the commenter is more likely to mean #1.

The commenter appears to desire the most convenient and quick "service" he/she can get, and is impartial to who provides it. He/she acknowledges that others could build better alternatives to Google. If holding Google accountable for its conduct helps others build better alternatives, this would meet the commenter's needs.

Without further clarification from the commenter, I am going to assume that #1 better represents his/her meaning.

maxwellito• 6 years ago

It even leads to funny situations sometimes : https://twitter.com/mxwllt/status/1225783057917063169

kevingadd7• 6 years ago

To be fair, I think pagerank would naturally end up putting those results on top, since gmaps is the mapping service lots of people are linking to - especially if you're linking to a saved route or location, it's going to be a url to the google maps service as a whole that probably boosts its pagerank. It's definitely not a clear-cut "they decided to do this" scenario like the infoboxes and such that the article is complaining about.

wolco4• 6 years ago

PageRank wasn't natural. Google properities started with a score of 10. Google friends 5-9. Your site 0.

fractionalhare• 6 years ago

A trending search in our data for “myocardial infarction” shows how Google has piled up its products at the top. It returned:

- Google’s dictionary definition.

- A “people also ask” box that expanded to answer related questions without leaving the search results page.

- A “knowledge panel,” which is an abridged encyclopedia entry with various links.

- And a “related conditions” carousel leading to various new Google searches for other diseases.

I don't know, I'm conflicted on examples like this. I see the point the article is going for, but I think it's better exemplified by the fact that there's a lot of advertising space taken up at the premium, top of the page on search results.

This example is not Google advertising itself so much as Google changing the features of the search engine itself. It's not emphasizing its own search results over "organic" search results, it's deemphasizing search results altogether in favor of quick, curated answers. Most of the time I can quickly tell what the "organic" source of the direct answer is.

I like that. Is there a way we could get quick curated answers like this without deemphasizing search results? Is that something most people would actually want? I feel a better point of contention is the number of ads, which I care more about.

Angostura• 6 years ago

This example is not Google advertising itself so much as Google changing the features of the search engine itself.

What it is an example of in my view is Google increasingly attemnpting to keep you on its site by scraping the information from other sites and displaying it.

Originally Google scraped the sites solely to build a better search index.

kevingadd7• 6 years ago

The definition of "search" or what it means to type something into the google search input field has changed over time, and that's probably the root of this.

It used to mean "show me web pages related to this input string", and some of those search results were sponsored (ads). Now it's interpreted more as "inform me about this input string" or "please help me with this", like a Siri or Google Assistant (though not necessarily in natural language).

When you view it as a "please assist me" query it makes sense to introduce things like answerboxes, related queries, embedded images or translations, etc. But that is VERY MUCH not "search" anymore.

It's quite possible that most people using a search engine actually want an Assistant, so google's new behavior is ideal for them. But where do you go when you actually want a search engine? You see people complain that over time Google has become worse as a search engine - using it to search for programming topics is definitely worse than it used to be, and its search results in general are often full of astroturfed pinterest or stackoverflow pages.

TomMarius2• 6 years ago

What is "search" and "search engine"? Are these words with well defined legal meaning (as you seem to use them like that)?

To you, a software person, search might be to look up and compare a string with a pile of other strings. To non-sw people, it is to look for the correct (abstract or concrete) thing/answer. Why should your definition win?

cowpig2• 6 years ago

You like it in the myopic sense of the word. In the way you like a big cake that sits in front of you, even if eating that cake is going to be bad for your health.

Google's monopolistic business practices are the same: they are convenient in the short-term for you, but they are destroying healthy industries. Over time the result won't be something you like.

JadeNB3• 6 years ago

Google's monopolistic business practices are the same: they are convenient in the short-term for you, but they are destroying healthy industries. Over time the result won't be something you like.

Amazon—which genuinely used to be a great and reliable shopping experience, and made a bunch of changes that looked user focussed—is a great example of this.

boogies7• 6 years ago

IMHO a ““related conditions” carousel leading to various new Google searches for other diseases” is an ad for a Google Search with more ads.

But on “a way we could get quick curated answers like this without deemphasizing search results”, one way to start would be to offer some instant answers as tabs next to the ones for images, news, videos etc., like the “Meanings” and “Definitions¨ tabs here https://duckduckgo.com/?q=boogie, some down among the organic results like the videos here https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+exit+vim, and on wide screens, some as side bars like the SO one at that last link.

chris_f4• 6 years ago

"Is there a way we could get quick curated answers like this without deemphasizing search results?"

Yes, here is an example of how it could work: https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=myocardial+infarction

Disclaimer, I made this website.

elpool23• 6 years ago

But this website also deemphasizes search results in favor of curated answers, just like Google.

zentiggr6• 6 years ago

Maybe Google needs to take the final step in this evolution.

Let's have Google show nothing but quick answers, nothing but their own info boxes etc.

No search results, nothing external.

That way, anyone looking for any other results HAS to leave Google in order to find anything.

And Google can pander to the percentage of people who honestly don't know or care that there's a web.

Are there enough of us who would avoid Google if we knew 100% that we would never see a reference to anywhere outside of their own properties?

thatguy0900• 6 years ago

Their info boxes are all scraped from other sites, would they still be able to legally scrape sites and display them like that without giving any links to actually follow?

emptyparadise• 6 years ago

I love that "How Far Down Are the Traditional Search Results?" graphic.

jforman2• 6 years ago

When I worked at Bing almost 20 years ago, the #1 search term was "Google". So maybe this is reasonable :)

(#2 was "Gogle")

wolco4• 6 years ago

Bing was launched in 2009. Where were you working in the year 2000?

jforman2• 6 years ago

I was at Microsoft, in MSN Search (which was later re-branded Bing). This was 2003.

WrtCdEvrydy• 6 years ago

poor guy worked for Bing, it probably felt like decades.

josefresco2• 6 years ago

I wonder that the numbers look like now. I could see someone searching "MSN" for "Google" because MSN was set to their home page, or the default search. I wonder if those practices are still widespread enough to create this same effect.

Given that Chrome is the new IE, I wonder how long (or ever) until they see competitors' brands in their popular search terms.

segfaultbuserr2• 6 years ago

Don't underestimate the technical illiteracy here. A significant number of people don't really understand how the address bar or an URL works in a web browser. Use web searching as a substitute of typing an URL is common, and some can't distinguish the "search" function of an address bar and the "enter an URL" function of an address bar. Searching "Google" in the address bar to access Google in Google Chrome is not unusual (sometimes you'll get a search result of 'Google' at Google, sometimes you'll be autocompleted and get a Google homepage, users don't notice the difference). This is also the underlying basis of Google's idea of abolishing the address bar - some users don't understand it, a Walled Garden is "better".

I'm not saying that I support Google's idea, just to point out a phenomenon that exists.

mrkramer6• 6 years ago

This is somewhat similar to the thread that I shared yesterday but nobody looked at it. Here is the link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23964461

dredmorbius4• 6 years ago

Separating search from content from services from advertising is starting to sound very appealing.

moron4hire• 6 years ago

If anything I am searching can even remotely be considered a product or paid service, I get an entire page, minus one link of links that have the [ad] box on them. And they're all shady 3rd party retailers. And when I want to find a product, to get the manufacturers website and product details, it's nowhere to be found. Just page upon page of [ad] links.

ricardo813• 6 years ago

My own personal observations

- The "rich results" do indeed save people a click

- Some of them are excerpts from sites crawled by Google (that will tend to now be the 2nd result) that the user will no longer click on

- Google's query disambiguation is the best in the business

- They'd had a history of piggy backing on external resources and then turning them into their own, e.g. DMOZ, now wikipedia. I'm sure their knowledge ontology will soon render Wiki obsolete and push them down a result also.

- They've taken some verticals and halved the number of clicks competitors or "price comparison" sites previously got, albeit it's their search engine, they lay it out as they see fit.

It's changed a lot since the "10 blue links". Most of us probably used to think of search engines as an agnostic finder of information on the web, with ads on top. Now with "query intent" and monetisation - the temptation is too much and it's not so much about finding information "out there", on the web.

Because of the position that Google is now in wrt their dominance in search markets and to the extent they can monetise a query, no one else can match their revenue per user or find alterative avenues of traffic that are comparable to their portal (i.e. Google in the UK commands 95% of searches, 80% of ad spend is between them and Facebook). If Google decides they want to enter a vertical, it's hugely detrimental to others in that market. Someone who ranked #1 10 years ago would get 50% of clicks, IIRC it's closer to 20% now, because of all the other media on the page.

But in the end, there are other choices. The problem is that due to the monetisation Google is capable of (based on a lot of data acquisition about their users), it's hard for anyone to carve out an alternative. Particularly so when Google pay phone vendors and browsers for them to be the default engine, it's a perpetuating cycle.

My personal ideal would be 5 or 6 independent search engines, with a number of meta engines built on top of those independent data sources;algos. Purely for the sake of getting alternative points of view and perhaps past any filters or bias.

umaar2• 6 years ago

Generally, I like the 'rich snippets' feature, but I think they've gotten worse.

For example here's a reddit post I made from 6 years ago showcasing a search for 'mac shortcut screenshot' https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1ou4i0/a_search_for...

It's extremely clear, and results in minimal cognitive effort in parsing the result.

Here's the result now: https://i.imgur.com/A726Dhw.png

There's so much more cruft:

- 4x low resolution screenshots which I initially thought were related to ads

- An extra URL

- Multi-step instructions

- Lots of extra words

- Bold formatting has been applied inconsistently

Seeing the text: "Command + Shift + 3" in big bold letters was great, but it's now changed into something else.

umaar2• 6 years ago

Turns out Google has been doing this for my own site on certain pages. If I search for:

devtools capture element screenshot

It has listed the exact instructions on the search results page: https://i.imgur.com/NTdDjZY.png

Can I get an outsider perspective, are those 4 list items shown in the rich snippet too many? Is it too wordy? I'm wondering if a single item which said:

Search for screenshot in the Command Menu (Cmd + Shift + P)

Would be better?

alickz• 6 years ago

I think it's fine. I'm not a webdev but I could follow your current instructions easily. I would definitely consider your instructions a good result if I was looking for the answer.

Although I prefer the second (wordier) example in OPs case anyway.

NoodleIncident• 6 years ago

I can think of two reasons that they might think the new version is better:

- The new snippet might be more useful to a majority of the people searching. It shows you the keys on the keyboard, it explains how to input it instead of relying on knowing the shortened notation, and it tells you where the screenshot will go. Since I don't use a mac myself, I feel like I've learned more from the latter than from the former.

- As you can see in the other reply to this comment, the new info box can pull info from any page with a numbered list of instructions. I don't know how the earlier info was extracted, but if you're going to pull out instructions like this for more queries about more complicated tasks, then it's better to be consistent, even if it could be expressed in a single bullet point.

I also find it funny that the source link is far more prominent in the newer rich snippet, even though a lot of people in this thread are saying they've made it harder to find.

pradn• 6 years ago

The problem here is that something that's useful for users (saving time with knowledge panels, question/answer lists, and suggested searches) also takes away clicks from other websites. Something can be both good for the user in the short-term (quicker answers) and bad for the user in the long term (fewer websites survive if clicks are diverted). We have the same issue with "ecosystems". It's great for the user that the Google Assistant can ring the Pixel phone if you don't know where it is. But it's one more feature that locks our smaller/independent competitors.

slantaclaus• 6 years ago

I just want to say that the “Linux” search results now seem more relevant than they were in the past. Internet.com? Lol

lorec0re• 6 years ago

Amazon top search results? Surprise, Amazon-made products!

JadeNB3• 6 years ago

Not defending Amazon, but that's far from the default experience in my experience. Maybe I just search for a lot of specific thing Amazon doesn't sell themselves.

JackPoach• 6 years ago

That's what happens when you have a monopoly.

auganov• 6 years ago

I would gladly pay for a search engine that actually did some things better than Google. Like say being better at finding [semi]exact phrases, especially longer ones. Something that focused on the long tail of search queries. Also, yes, I do feel like Google has gotten pretty bad for some normal queries. But this might as well be a function of the Internet/Web changing overall.

But I find this focus on Google's supposed moral infractions ridiculous. And then competitors popup that have a strictly worse products user-wise, but want to win by claiming higher moral ground. They don't fix any of the issues. I just don't see any of that taking off.

To date, I have not seen a single search engine that actually does something significant better. Not only that, pretty much all of them fail miserably for anything more specific. This tells me Google is still absolutely on top of their game.

I like these widgets. Sometimes I even get annoyed when I WAS expecting it to popup but it wouldn't.

tristan9572• 6 years ago

Privacy is a major feature. Morality is most definitely something a business can be better at. You can't just hand wave it away like it doesn't matter. DuckDuckGo might not give the best results, but I would trade that for privacy 10 times out of 10.

markosaric• 6 years ago

Great study and presentation!

And an impressive website for a publisher. The average publisher is full of advertising, calls-to-action and several MBs weight of external scripts. This one is so simple, fast to load and clean. Congrats!

rondennis• 6 years ago

I feel Google has turned on its pledge of doing no evil. It is not shamelessly stealing publishers content and displaying it in the featured snippets. So the searcher has really no incentive of clicking on the search result anymore. He is getting all the information on Google itself.

wasdfff• 6 years ago

Usually the snippets are outright crap. But this is the end result of SEO noise overwhelming signal.

pwinnski2• 6 years ago

Search engines seem like they're subject to quantum mechanics, in that they're the observer that affects the state of the internet.

An internet without search engines was an internet without SEO, and without vast fortunes being spent on manipulating content to sell garbage. Launching "Backrub" in that environment must have seemed like an unalloyed good, but the very act of launching it turned out to have a profoundly negative impact on the web as a whole.

pwinnski2• 6 years ago

I guess I mean this as a semi-defense of Google, even though I don't like them and use DDG personally.

When doing a search on travel, what are the odds you get not-garbage in your results? Compare, say, 2000 to 2020. I can see a scenario in which Google was committed to providing open results, but those open results slowly became garbage, and they felt compelled to launch their own tool to ensure good results.

And sure, it puts profit in their pocket too, of course.

gundmc• 6 years ago

How a search for “Linux” has changed. In 2000, Google only returned “organic” results, ads, and a category header. Now the top of the page is full of Google products and “answers.” Source: 2000 screenshot/Archive.org

Weird example to use in a screenshot since everything they show is a link to an external site.

lokar2• 6 years ago

I don't recall Google ever promising to be a "pure" web search engine, just indexing all the pages.

Quite the opposite, they said the goal was to organize and present information. The goal has always been the most relevant information given the query. Early on, that pretty much always meant a web page. More and more, they already know the answer and can present it with a better UX for the user.

Why should they be required to be a "pure" index of web pages?

gukov• 6 years ago

Similarly to Amazon replacing popular products with their own, Google is doing the same with search results.

lokar2• 6 years ago

I'm not sure it's really the same. Someone asks Google "how far is it from Portland to Austin", and before they got 10 blue links, and now they get a number. That's not the same as "amazon, send me some Coke" and them sending Amazon brand cola drink.

personjerry• 6 years ago

Some of the answers in this thread actually allude to the bias in this study: People actively change their behaviors to accommodate Google's knowledge panels, meaning some portion of the "15000 top search queries" they studied are actually people seeking Google's results, not general search results.

ss7pro3• 6 years ago

Sorry but google flights have no competition. There is no better or more flexible and fast flight search than Google. No wonder why they won. Expedia should invest more in their flight search if they want to win.

swagatkonchada• 6 years ago

"no competition" i guess you meant this figuratively. But in fact there is a ton of competition and the point of the article is that G is suppressing that competition by unfairly giving themselves the space which needs the least number of clicks to reach.

baby-yoda• 6 years ago

Google (as well as Facebook) are becoming AOL 2.0 - users only know the service and not the mechanism or source. All info comes from G (or F). Syndicated or outright copied from all over the web but appearing with the “friendly, familiar and welcoming Logo our users know, love and trust” /s

drusepth• 6 years ago

Makes sense to me. Google Flights is amazing, Google Stocks is better than my broker (and way easier/faster), Translate doesn't even have a decent competitor, and Restaurants isn't perfect but just makes it easier to get to Google Maps.

As a consumer, this is great.

As a small business owner, I'm not very concerned about Google usurping pieces of my site into a widget. If the entirety of a business/site can be replaced with a free single-action widget, it's probably better for the consumer to do so.

If I were a big business (Expedia, Yelp, etc) affected by this, I would be more concerned about improving my product than a competitor simply copying functionality.

eggsnbacon12• 6 years ago

Competitors have a hard time getting off the ground because the dominant player is promoting its own products. Classic monopoly. Competition won't be good if nobody uses them.

Google maps might be a good example, MapQuest and Terraserver used to be better for navigation and satellite photos. Did they fail because of business reasons or self promotion? Hard to know, but Google pulled the same shit as MS got antitrust for. Bundling their own maps app pre-installed on their dominant mobile OS

acituan• 6 years ago

...promoting its own products. Classic monopoly

How is promoting equivalent to classic monopoly? They are not removing competitors from search results. They are ranking based on relevance and apparently users are happy with their own widgets coming up on top.

speedgoose• 6 years ago

Deepl is better than Google translate for the few languages it supports.

hu3• 6 years ago

That might be true but bear in mind that Deepl supports 11 languages while Google Translate supports 108.

aftbit• 6 years ago

A bit OT: can anyone recommend a good web-based OpenStreetMaps viewer with support for toggling multiple layers (e.g. topo, streets, satellite, political boundaries) and decent measuring tools?

rmc• 6 years ago

There's a few MapCompare instances for showing many different maps: https://mc.bbbike.org/mc/

jb775• 6 years ago

Probably because a lot of boomers open browsers and initially type "google" into the top bar (which does a google search for "google") just to get to the actual google website...then search for w/e they actually want to search for.

coronadisaster• 6 years ago

I'm surprised Google doesnt get sued for copyright infringement for large snippets that they include at the top of search results...

Yhippa• 6 years ago

Because of the things cited in the article I spend less time in the Google search results page. I typically find the answer I'm looking for and get on with my day. Because I'm spending less time I actually use it more now.

Sometimes when I'm looking up stuff on how to do things physically like how to install a part in a car or fix something in my house I'll get a YouTube widget at the top which will take me to the exact moment in a video where what I'm looking for is being performed. This is magic to me. However Google is definitely promoting themselves in this case and I might not go anywhere past the very top of the search results page. Is this a bad thing?

aidenn0• 6 years ago

Anyone have a recommendation for replacing hipmunk? I haven't found anything that shows as much information so visually and intuitively.

slmjkdbtl• 6 years ago

Good read! Also impressed by how the article page is designed/engineered. I wonder for a site like this how much of the content is hard coded and how much is made by tools / frameworks (the interactive scrolling box really looks like a hard-coded component for this article specifically)

james305• 6 years ago

Who cares? Are they a non-profit? People who are offended by this have never run a business.

sjreese• 6 years ago

Google continues to abuse its market power, and the industry has not rebounded, despite the remedy.

musicale• 6 years ago

This has been the case for a while and should not be surprising to anyone.

It's not terrible (Google's and Bing's promoted and internal modular results "above the fold" are often useful and relevant) but it does make it harder to use modern search portals to actually search the general web outside promoted results.

t0ughcritic2• 6 years ago

Googles next five results? Surprise... Ads, pay to play

t0ughcritic2• 6 years ago

Google is removing the concept of urls and domains. Apps do this but so does not showing part of the URL in the URL bar and not showing the URL as it is in the result pages without the breadcrumb type redesign. They also realized they make more money when they show a favicon of websites to obfuscate the fact that they have to legally label Ads as ads. The ads txt is directly proportional to the size of the fav icon in serps. Google is evil.

Let’s not forget how google reader and blogger were killed. The greater idea is to not remember anything and to go directly to google each time, making them the sole source of content.

Google’s top search result is Google

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